Queen of rap

Missy Elliott: "I always feel the need to work as if I don't
have a deal."

She's known as the toughest woman in rap - and she's barely five feet tall.
Missy Elliott tells Lindsay Baker about her abusive childhood, working with
Madonna and why, unlike her friends, she won't put up with useless
boyfriends.

Missy Elliott can laugh now, but at the time it wasn't so funny. She's
telling me about the wild bear that recently came to visit her country house in
New Jersey. It wandered up the driveway and made itself at home in the front
yard. "He trailed the garbage across the yard and then just lay there, taking
it easy," Elliott says with a husky laugh.

Her mother called the police. "She was, like, `Shoot him!' which you can't
do, of course." That bear wasn't going anywhere. She giggles at the memory.

Giggly isn't what you expect from Missy "Misdemeanor" Elliott. Her
fearsome, alpha-female reputation precedes her. This is the woman who in one of
her videos appeared as a towering, three-metre-tall superhero flying through
cyberspace; who performed in a vast, black inflatable bin-liner-like one-piece
with rhinestone headpiece.

She's put the miseries of childhood with a violent father behind her -
something she'll talk about now - to become America's first black female music
mogul, respected queen of the male-dominated hip-hop world, with her own record
label and a reputation as the sharpest businesswoman in music, as well as the
richest woman in rap. She is endlessly innovative and the winner of numerous
awards. Wealthy, talented, in control: big, scary diva is what you expect.

The Missy Elliott who sits smiling in front of me, however, is calm and sunny
with a mellow, unassuming demeanour; she's 30, but looks about 19, and she
speaks with a gentle Southern twang. And she's tiny: 152 centimetres tall. When
her minder comes in with her coffee, she looks pocket-sized beside him. She lost
around 25 kilograms a couple of years ago, not, she stresses, to conform to the
industry's expectations (she was rejected as a solo artist early in her career
because of her size), but for health reasons. Her small frame seems almost
weighed down by the huge, diamond-encrusted crucifix around her neck, the chunky
charm bracelet jangling around her small wrist.

As it turned out, of course, she proved the industry resoundingly wrong. When
she and her songwriting partner, Tim "Timbaland" Mosely, wrote a hit for the
late Aaliyah in 1996, suddenly attitudes changed. Those who had dismissed
Elliott as too fat to make it as a solo singer in the "bootylicious" world of
hip-hop began making her offers.

Considering her early rejections because of her appearance, she is
surprisingly sanguine about sexism in hip-hop. "So the way I look at it is, I
don't consider myself a `ho', and if I say `bitch' I'm gonna take it and switch
it to my way." The rest she dismisses as bravado. "You get people who rap
about stuff that they don't do all day long. Half those guys, you hear them on
the radio and then you meet them and you're like, `Wow, they're so sweet.'
"

With five albums in six years, the woman hasn't had a holiday since she began
her career.

"I always feel the need to work as if I don't have a deal, because that's
what's going to keep me around for a long time."

Everything she knows she learned from her mother, "not depending on people,
working hard - she was always determined not to fail".

Not a day goes by, she says, when she doesn't think about the times she used
to sing in the backyard as a child, or the times they had to put away the bread
so the mice wouldn't get it. "Now I'm owning four houses and eight cars," she
says. She's able to take care of her mother, who used to sing, but gave it up to
raise her daughter. "It's almost like I work to see her happiness."

Elliott and her mother, Patricia, have been through a great deal together.
Born Melissa Elliott in Portsmouth, Virginia, the young Missy knew from the age
of four she wanted to be a performer. She'd always reply "superstar" when
asked at school what she wanted to do when she grew up, though she doesn't think
they took her seriously at the time - she was always the "class clown". But
it's true, she says. "I never saw anything else, never dreamed of doing
anything else."

Her determination was fuelled by the situation she found herself in - her
father beat her mother just about every day. "My father was very abusive, and
it was hard for my mother at first to leave because we had depended on him for
so long. Sometimes you kind of get adjusted to getting that beating."

He hit his daughter once, too, and she was terrified of him. Once he pulled a
gun on them both. She would never stay over at a friend's house because she was
scared she would come home and find her mother dead.

While her father was still a marine, the family lived for a while in the
coastal town of Jacksonville, North Carolina, in a mobile home community, and
that was where she felt she belonged. She would sing Jackson 5 songs for
neighbours and do concerts in her bedroom for her dolls. She enjoyed school for
the friendships she formed, but had little interest in school work, though when
she was sent for an IQ test she was classified above average and was made to
jump two years ahead of her class. Away from her friends, she found herself
increasingly isolated.

It was then that her father left the marines and the family moved back to
Virginia, where they lived in a vermin-infested shack. Elliott remembers sending
letters and tapes to her heroes Michael and Janet Jackson in the hope they might
come and rescue her. They never replied.

The violence against her mother got worse, and in her teens Missy was
reaching breaking point. She used to come home from school every day, shut
herself in her room and cry all night. Eventually, when she turned 14, relatives
convinced her mother they had to leave. When her father was out one day, a truck
turned up at the house and her uncles, aunts and cousins loaded it up with the
family possessions; they left her father with a fork, a spoon and a blanket. It
was a scary time. He didn't try to track them down; today, daughter and father
occasionally talk, but she hasn't forgiven him.

"When we left, my mother realised how strong she was on her own, and it made
me strong. It took her leaving to realise."

Things started to come together after that. They moved back to Portsmouth and
it was there that the singer-producer Devante took an interest in the group
Sista that Missy formed with girlfriends and her neighbour and songwriting
partner Timbaland. Sista didn't survive, but she and Timbaland were noticed.
That's when things took off.

Growing up in that kind of atmosphere must have left its mark. Practically,
it had one effect: in 1999, Missy Elliott launched a lipstick called
Misdemeanor, the proceeds to go to Break The Cycle, an organisation for the
survivors of domestic violence. More personally, she says, "You know what it
does? It makes me not take a man's shit."

She has female friends who take "a lot of stuff" from their boyfriends.
"They're cussed at, they can't go nowhere, they have to move when the guy says
move." If you get to a certain point in your career, she says, and have been by
yourself, it gets hard when somebody comes in and tries to tell you what to do.
"With half my friends, the guy ain't paying the bills either," she says,
bemused. "And I'm, like, `Wow, there's no way in the world I can do that,'
because I watched my mother have to escape from that. It can't be them telling
me what to do, that's not gonna work. If I find somebody, we're going to have to
meet each other halfway."

No wonder, she muses, women such as Jennifer Lopez and Halle Berry have
trouble in love. "They're women who have everything, and then if somebody comes
along and tries to tell them what to do . . . " she laughs, "they'll probably
be, like, `Are you crazy? I'm J-Lo!' "

Elliott was brought up, and remains, a Baptist. "That most definitely plays
a part in who I am and how I handle things. I try not to be cruel to people, I
know there's a karma, and I'm constantly thinking of my blessings. I live and
die by being a Baptist. If I can't go to church on a Sunday, I'll get a tape by
the Clark Sisters and slide it in for the day."

After their recent work together on a Gap commercial, Madonna took Elliott to
her house, sat her down and talked about "how she got to where she's at", and
ways "to have peace of mind in this business". She introduced her to her
"spiritual adviser", who gave her a kabbalah red string to wear around her
wrist, which is believed to absorb negative energy and protect your aura. This
might sound like a rather patronising scenario, particularly given Elliott's
well-established religious beliefs, and it was reported that there was tension
between the two, but Elliott is full of praise for Madonna.

There's something about her still of the starstruck kid who sent off letters
to the Jacksons. Arguably, it was Madonna who gained more, in terms of
credibility, from the association with the hipper-than-hip Missy Elliott, but,
Elliott maintains that the TV commercial and the live performance with Madonna
were possibly the highest spot in her career.

Likewise, she looks back on the times she has worked with stars like Janet
Jackson, Whitney Houston, Mariah Carey and Mick Jagger as her big moments.
"These are people you don't normally get within breathing distance of, or even
within turnpike distance. To be in the same room as them, and hear them say, `I
love your music,' that is a big event."

As for that wild bear in her front yard - even when the police turned on
their sirens and started throwing stones at him, he still wasn't budging. Missy
Elliott laughs. "I said, `You know what, bear, you can have this house. I'm
moving, you can stay here.' " Maybe she's not so bold and unyielding, after
all.